🎙️ Episode 30: CRAIGSLIST — and the Man Behind It: Craig Newmark

Craigslist, who hasn't heard of that, an amazing, amazing accomplishment. We sat down with Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, for a fascinating and very unique discussion this week on Jewish Grit. >> [music] >> Welcome to Jewish Grit this week with a very special guest, Craig Newmark. You may have heard of his first name, founder of Craigslist, and we begin by welcoming you to the podcast. Hey, I'm really glad to be here. It's wonderful to have you and to wish you happy birthday. Thanks. It's Just past Saturday was your birthday. It's 73. I feel it. Wonderful. Now, share with us something really, I think, amazing that you did on your birthday. >> Well, I announced that I had officially signed up for the Giving Pledge, committing to giving away uh during my lifetime at least a half my net worth. I may have done so already, depending on how you count. So, the real purpose was just to put a stake in the ground and maybe to inspire uh really rich guys, billionaires, to pony up some dough. Thank you for inspiring them. Let's jump into the to the content of the podcast, which is Jewish Grit. I'm looking back on the 73 years that you were blessed to have in this world. Is there a moment, either professionally or personally, that you felt you really needed Jewish grit? You needed to grit yourself and push forward. Someone pushed you up against the ropes and you had to get up, dust stuff off, and somehow figure things out. Somehow in my uh 40s, I realized that most of the problems I've had in life have been caused by myself. It has to do with lack of empathy, uh lack of social skills, and I just wasn't listening to people. Some of them were giving me good advice, the best of which was that my sense of humor it was my only saving grace. And I would just be a jerk at times. Having admitted that to myself, I started oh, being a different person. So, at core, I'm still what I was. I'm still an introvert there. I'm still someone who doesn't have social skills naturally. But, these days I do an adequate job of faking social skills. Does that make you uncomfortable? No, not normally. Unless I'm in a let's say a loud party. And I can fake it for a short while then. But, after a while I start getting cranky and look for the door. Why did it take you till 43 to figure that out? It may just be some effects of age, somehow settling down. I had moved to San Francisco not long before. And I guess I was starting to do things on the net. People were helping me out and I was looking for ways to help other people out. That's how a Craigslist got started. Let's talk about that cuz I think that's probably everyone's fascination. How how old were you when you started Craigslist? Oh, I was 42. Very nice. And what happens? You're sitting in your kitchen one day and you're like, let me do something, let me start Craigslist, or what was the thought process? Since I've sat very little in my kitchen, I was probably reading or watching TV and then was thinking that a lot of people had helped me out on the net. I should give back. I should reciprocate. I intuited that that would connect me to people more. And I really needed that. So, I started a simple CC list, maybe a dozen people I know or knew, who I could tell about technology and arts events that I heard about. That started with things like Joe's Digital Diner, which got together people uh around spaghetti dinner to use the new multimedia stuff to tell stories. Remember, this was 30 years ago. >> Right. And back then a Mac was a big deal, a new thing. And there was also the Anon Salon, which was a party and fundraiser for something called Climate Theater. As it turns out, it was connected to the earliest form of the Burning Man event, and they had been running it on the beach in San Francisco, but they had outgrown the beach, and that's where they went to the Black Rock Desert. >> Right. I never really got connected to Burning Man. I never was a burner. And I was getting to be at that age when I would only go if I could go in a luxury vehicle with a shower. And then okay, so let's let's take this a step further. And then when does it start really growing? It grew continuously, slowly, but seriously from the very beginning. Word of mouth. The 12 people became more and then more. This was '95. And in the middle of '95, I remember that the CC list I was using an email broke at about 240 addresses. So it grew from about 12 to 240 in oh, I'd say three or four months. And this is guesswork from memory. My ideal was that it just, you know, it was just growing that way, word of mouth. But when the CC list broke, I had to use a list serve. And a guy, Eric Thayer, gave me use of his Major Domo list server, which I I guess you don't hear much about anymore. But and I had to give it a name, and as a nerd, I'm very literal. So I wanted to call it SF Events, even though at that point it was probably more than just uh just events. And people told me, "Hey, uh they I I had inadvertently created a brand." They explained to me what a brand is. And they told me they called it Craigslist. That was the brand. They were right. And that uh calling it that reminded me that I had a personal duty to do the right thing for my community in this sense. And maybe that act started building empathy in a substantial way. It's hard to say. But again, it wasn't me who named the thing. It was a couple people around me. Most particularly uh a guy named Anthony Back. >> So he is the genius behind the Craigslist name. Let's call him a genius, sure. He might hear this. He might like it. Okay, so at what point do you realize that you have something that you can monetize? >> I guess I started realizing that after a lot of growth through a '97 or so. People who put jobs on the site told me that they wanted to pay me to put jobs there because the postings they put were more effective than the sites where people paid for job postings. I skipped a step in there. Sometime in '96 I realized that email has a predictable format. And I'm a programmer. I can write code which turns emails into web pages. And so I had instant low volume web hosting for free. It wouldn't do the job these days because the techniques available to me at that point were expensive in terms of computer time expended. But I had something going. And that was in '96. And again, '97 milestones. People wanted to do pay me to put stuff up. I was getting about a million page views per month, which back then was big. And volunteers wanted to help run the site. So '98, volunteers. That didn't work. And the people who wanted to pay, they got me again and said, "Hey, uh if I wanted the thing to survive, I had to get serious. Serious meaning making it into a company. How does an introvert all of a sudden start a company? Well, I'd already given myself a mission. I'd given something produced something that had uh built community. I had a duty to my community and it was the way I connected to people. So, I figured I would do what felt right, get serious, hire people, charge at that point I think just job postings and was just Bay Area and I just kept making the code better. Got some guy who could do accounting software. I was doing customer service myself as well as coding, but then I got some help and just uh plugged away, got a little legal help, but got no communications help, which was a mistake. The hard decision was at that point I was approached by VCs and bankers who wanted to throw a lot of money at me, billions, if I would do the usual thing and monetize heavily. But back in Hebrew school in Morris 10, New Jersey, the Jewish Community Center, Mr. and Mrs. Levin in Sunday school, literally they taught me to know when enough is enough. They also taught me uh you should treat people like you want to be treated. Well, that translates to uh good customer service because I want good customer service for myself. Knowing when enough is enough, that meant that well, I don't mind. I don't have anything against money, but I only needed enough for myself and maybe my family and so we decided I decided to monetize minimally. And that back then it was job postings, although it grew to include other categories. Sometimes to limit how much people posted and overdid it. Skipping ahead a little bit, uh I at one point we found that apartment brokers in New York City had discovered Craigslist and were posting the same apartment multiple times a day since it was free, making it unmanageable. So, I was here wandering around uh over the West Village, the East Village, Tompkins Square Park, and people were telling me that uh you know, too many apartment posts that were the same. And they were also telling me though that a new apartment broker would make like 20K a year. And that's not enough to uh make a living in New York. They had to work typically two or three jobs. So, we figured out what to do, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The idea is I did learn a lot from Mr. and Mrs. Levin, who were Holocaust survivors. Uh I didn't learn until a couple years ago when the Forward found his descendants and got his story. Because as I recall, he had a broken finger. And normally uh you figure it's not a good idea to jump off a uh moving train. Wow. But if the train is taking you to a concentration camp, it is a good idea to jump out. And so, he uh did a lot of uh running and hiding. I think met up with partisans or something like that. Eventually uh rescued his wife and daughter. And um his uh grandchildren are around. Uh I think at least one of them is working in Silicon Valley. But the Forward, you know, the traditional uh Yiddish language paper. Not Yiddish anymore. >> But they uh looked them up for me, and that was great to hear. And I uh need to do more for the uh Jewish community center because I hear they are there are stairs that need to be repaired. Got it. So, in essence, it was something that you had learned as a child that came back to you at that moment. And that really changed your direction. Yeah. Uh they set my moral compass. There's other things, too, like uh they told me that it was wrong to bear false witness, and their lessons stuck with me. They were internalized for a long time until people in interviews kept asking me why. And I figured out more and more. Now and then, someone helps fill in the gaps in my memory or knowledge. Like the Levins or somebody maybe a year ago now told me they calculated I turned down in effect around 11 billion. But I've done much better than I ever thought I would. This is all pretty surreal. But I don't know the point in uh having a lot of money once you get the basics done and have enough that you don't have to think about it. Hence my philanthropy. Did uh Mr. and Mrs. Levin teach you about philanthropy? Or that came just from yourself? Well, I had other examples uh of people doing stuff and getting stuff done. For example, people were were asking me why not make a lot of money and then give a little bit of it away like Carnegie. Right. Like I appreciate the libraries and so on, but it seemed to be better to let people keep the money they would use to advertise. And as a result, Craigslist is about helping people put food on the table. Of course, it also helps you get a table. So, that all uh all works out pretty well together. Do you Do you still own Craigslist? 3 years ago, I took all my Craigslist equity, my shares, put it into a 501c4 foundation. I call it the Septuagenarian Fund because I did it when I turned 70 and I have a sense of humor. And that's uh where the uh ownership went. Now, I've kept enough for Mrs. Newmark and I to be very comfortable. But we do think about uh how we spend money. I got down here on the uh A train. I well, I like the subway. Yes. In many cases, especially through Midtown, it's quicker. I'm enough of a New Yorker now to know some of how to use the subway. And I've only gotten lost in the wrong boroughs three times. Two of them were my fault. Craig, 73 years into your journey, did you ever dream early in life that this is how you would be at this point in your life? Never. It's all been very surreal. Any uh success I've had has been accidentally being in the right time and place, which makes me the Forrest Gump of the internet. And it's all been a a big surprise. And I guess I'm trying to live up to the uh money. It helps that I've brushed up against a a number of billionaires or read their stories, and the majority of them, the money has made them miserable, and I'm not miserable. Do you ever study Torah? I did in the past. I now read little bits of things, but I do know that uh one of the reasons for doing well, for giving away a lot publicly is maybe to inspire people with serious money to uh ponying up some dough. And so far, the uh not a much not as much of that as I'd like to see. My uh I guess hero in that sense, if any, is MacKenzie Bezos, who's doing a great job and she has given away a lot more than I have to some of the folks I give, like the Bob Woodruff Foundation, which runs a network of charities that supports vets. How do you decide who to give to? Sometimes there seems like there's enough money going in some areas. Bill Gates is doing a job with uh worldwide vaccines. It just occurred to me that vets and military families in our country don't get the support that they've earned. Also, our country is under attack, cyber attacks, scams, and very little money is going to that. Looking back at kind of the gifts that you've received and where you're at today, what would you tell yourself at the age of 22? I really need to talk to people more, to listen what they got going on, uh especially when they're trying to tell me something that's important, like I should uh stop trying to impress people. I don't need to correct people as much as I thought, and if so, usually uh if I have to correct them, unless it's really urgent, I'll uh correct them privately. That's interesting. The bottom line of that now is that I'm I don't correct people much at all. What's your definition of success today, and what was it, let's say, when you first started Craigslist? When I first started Craigslist, I had no idea what success would be. Now success means I'm uh fulfilling the mission, uh or I was until I retired from that. Now I have a different mission. Doing uh well by doing good. And Craigslist was mostly about putting food on the table, and maybe getting that table. And uh I was happy to make a uh uh financially successful life for myself and my family. Uh that worked out. That's reason That's a reasonable amount of success. Craig, what makes you most proud to be a Jew? I guess it's the uh set of values and tradition that I'm part of, and in terms of the uh trueness of what I've been taught. What would you tell, um, the next generation of aspiring Jewish leaders? They're in their 20s, low 30s, and trying to figure out A, what they can do personally to be successful, and then what they can do for the greater Jewish community to be successful. I start much more fundamentally with the notion that treat people like you want to be treated. Um, know when enough is enough. And consider that, uh, to some large extent, you got to be your brother's keeper or your sister's keeper. You start with that, and as it There's also a lot of, uh, hard business lessons where I'm not comfortable giving advice. Uh, concretely speaking, um, like these days, in all aspects of business, you do need to learn something about AI. But I'm pretty sure there is a bubble of some unknown sort. And you want to pay attention to it it and use it cautiously because the people building the large language models haven't remembered, uh, garbage in, garbage out. And if they train their models using misinformation, then at times the models will lie to people. Like I'm not comfortable with a model trained with materials including, let's say, the, uh, Peking People's Communist Daily, whatever it's called, or the same publication in Tehran, or, uh, Moscow. Or for that matter, uh, you know, a, uh, I really wish they wouldn't learn from, uh, neo-Nazi publications. That's not my idea of a good good idea. And yet they chew up all the material they can find. And so, uh, they the models will lie mostly because of careless training. Sometimes it's malicious, but most often just careless. Wait till the lawyers figure out the liability issues. I really appreciate you coming down here on the train and the value of the time that we spent together. Thank you so much for being a guest. >> It's my pleasure. Thanks. Thank you for listening to Jewish Grid, an Olami Mentorship Podcast. At Olami Mentorship, we believe that everyone needs a mentor. What better way is there to tap into your personal and professional potential than with a Jewish mentor at your side? Learn more at olami.org/mentorship. Don't forget to keep listening on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.